Who are the faces of the digital society today? Is the web really inclusive enough?
The 2014 edition of PDF France focused on looking at interesting initiatives in France and abroad that are trying to empower those "excluded" from digital society. Read More

The keyword "hairy bacon", derogatory term referred to Mao Zedong's corpse, proliferated in many forms on the Chinese Internet.

At Personal Democracy Forum, a session called “From memes to movements,” practitioners and researchers explored how the irreverent humor of memes is used by citizens that live in countries with limited opportunities of expressing themselves. Read More

“I gave my e-vote. This is not only convenient, but a vote of confidence to one of the best IT systems in the world, a vote of confidence to the Estonian State,” tweeted Toomas Hendrik Ilves , the president of ... Read More

One of the layers of the Monithon Map shows government-confiscated real estate that once belonged to the mafia

In Italy, an independently developed initiative called "Monithon" is trying to foster online citizen observation and reporting on the development of projects funded by the European Union, a topic of particular interest at the moment given it is only a week from the European Parliamentary elections. Read More

A peaceful protest during NETmundial (photo by Camille François/Twitter)

While Netmundial did advance some important issues, such as recognizing the Internet as a global resource and the right to development as enabled by the Internet, the culmination of the conference, with the drafting of the Multistakeholder Statement did not live up to the expectations of many attendees, especially the members of civil society who had come to address issues like privacy, net neutrality and the future of Internet governance.
At issue was the conference's multistakeholder approach, which sought to include the voices of thousands of those from government, academia, the private sector, civil society and the technical community, but failed to address power imbalances which gave some voices more weight, even disproportionately, one might argue. Read More

Facebook's first built-from-scratch data center. The company recently opened one In Sweden (Photo: Intel Free Press/Flickr)

Alexey Lisovenko, a member of the Moscow City Council, who has recently proposed that all personal data of Russians from all social media sites should be housed in servers located on Russian soil. He says it is to protect the Russian people from NSA spying but activists say the move would only allow Russia to better control online expression. Read More

"Water and sanitation are a human right! Water is a public good, not a commodity!"
This is not a sign that could be seen in a street protest, but the title of a petition that recently gathered 1.6 million online signatures among European citizens and was presented to the European Commission earlier this year.
This was also the first official effort of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), a petition instrument created by the EU in order to give citizens a way to push requests and issues that they care about to the attention of the EU institutions.
But, as the European Commission issued an official response that proved non-committal and unsatisfactory to the committee, the issue also seem to now extend to the effectiveness of the ECI itself. Read More